WASHINGTON, D.C.—The city awoke this morning to find itself bristling with security and with opportunism—security, because this is the seat of American government, and opportunism, because this is a nerve center of American politics, and it is an election year, and they just can't help themselves. He, Trump took to Twitter, and to cable news, to express his opinion that the attacks in Brussels were proof that A) he is right about everything, and B) that it's time to "expand the laws" to permit waterboarding, ignoring the fact that "expanding the law" was precisely what the Avignon Presidency did, with the help of magic memos from pet lawyers like John Yoo.

He said such changes to the city, as in Paris, showed why the US should stop letting immigrants into the country. Trump told Fox & Friends that if he were president, "I would close up our borders to people until we figure out what's going on." Pressed by NBC's Today Show, 15 minutes later, to explain who he would prevent from entering the country, Trump said he would exclude people from Syria and people who do not have "perfect documentation." He did not say that he would prevent Muslims from entering the country, as he has done repeatedly in the past, but he did suggest that Muslims were responsible for terrorist attacks if they did not report neighbours' suspicious behaviour to authorities. If Trump were president today, he said he would give US citizens a "pep talk". The Today presenters asked Trump what he would do if, as in the case in Belgium, he had Salah Abdeslam, a suspect in last year's Paris attacks, in custody."If they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding," Trump said. "You have to get the information from people."

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Sorry. Thanks for the pep talk, but it's still a war crime and you can't make it less of one unless you "expand" the Geneva Conventions or pull the United States out of them, and I probably shouldn't give him any ideas. If someone can explain to me the news value of this gibberish, I'm all ears.

Meanwhile, Tailgunner Ted Cruz fairly leaped onto the Twitter machine to accuse the president of enabling the Brussels atrocities through inadequate labeling. Maybe this is a job for the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

We will name our enemy—radical Islamic terrorism. And we will defeat it.

Presto!

The fact is that the blood hasn't even dried yet, and nobody really knows anything, not even how many people carried out the attacks, except that the Belgian authorities seem to have come heartbreakingly close to at least minimizing Tuesday's carnage. Four days ago, when they busted Saleh Abdeslam, one of the organizers of the Paris attacks last year, the authorities were quick to announce that, when he was arrested, Abdeslam appeared to be in the final stages of another series of attacks. (It should also be noted that the Muslim community in Brussels provided authorities with information critical to Abdeslam's arrest, not that it will matter much over here.) This, sadly, turned out to be the case.

The president took his time, which is what actual leaders do when information is sketchy and when there really isn't anything an American president can do. He led off his speech in Havana with a brief statement on the attacks.

The world must unite—we must be together, regardless of nationality or race or faith, in fighting against the scourge of terrorism.

It looks like he will continue his trip to Cuba and thence to Argentina. This will cause heads to explode among his critics, but it also is what a president does. If we're all supposed to go on with our lives, then he's supposed to do that, too. But we also should go on with our lives full in the knowledge that every solution proposed by the flock of "security experts" who descend on the nation's Green Rooms every time something like this happens has holes in it that can be exploited. The guys with the big guns around the Capitol here know that. So does everyone else, including the people running for president. It's just not something that we talk about in this season of cheap bullying and easy nostrums.